Kfar Saba

At the heart of the Israeli coastal plain, in the Sharon region, lies a city whose name carries a twofold memory: that of a Jewish antiquity attested by the rabbinic texts, and that of a pioneering rebirth at the dawn of the twentieth century. Kfar Saba is mentioned in the Talmud on several occasions and was an important town in the era of the Second Temple. Between these two milestones—the village evoked by the sages and the modern municipality—stretches a long documentary silence that only toponymy and archaeology can fill.

The singularity of Kfar Saba lies precisely in this continuity of the name. Modern Kefar Sava, the first Jewish settlement in the southern Sharon, was founded in 1903—six years before Tel-Aviv—beside the Arab village of Kafr Sābā, which had preserved the ancient name. This book sets out to follow the thread of this transmitted memory and of the established archive, from the Hasmonean fortifications to the contemporary high-tech city. The project belongs as much to History as to Memory: the former rests on the soil, the deeds of sale, and the municipal chronicles; the latter draws upon the Talmud and the oral tradition of the Sharon. Our approach consists in confronting them honestly, signaling at each step the nature of the source.

Toponymy is here the first of the documents. The name "Kfar Saba"—literally "the village of the grandfather" or "of the old man" in Hebrew—has crossed two millennia, persisting almost unchanged in the mouths of the place's Arab inhabitants in the form "Kafr Sābā." It is this persistence that allowed the modern founders to claim a direct filiation with the Talmudic city.

According to rabbinic tradition and the studies that derive from it, Kfar Saba is mentioned in the Talmud on several occasions and was an important town in the period of the Second Temple; it is known that King Alexander Jannaeus built there a network of fortifications extending to the coast, in order to repel an invasion coming from the north. This association of the locality with the Hasmonean dynasty places ancient Kfar Saba within the defensive apparatus of the Jewish kingdom of the 2nd–1st centuries before the common era, when the Sharon plain constituted a strategic buffer between Judea and the northern powers.

The ancient site, however, did not coincide exactly with the present-day town. Ancient Kfar Saba is associated with Tel Khirbet Sabieh, near the Ge'ulim neighborhood. This dissociation between the archaeological mound and the modern settlement, frequent in the Israeli landscape, invites caution: the continuity of the name does not imply the continuity of the exact place of habitation. We are here at the intersection of Memory and the archive—the Talmud transmits the recollection of a city, the tell yields its material traces, and the name secures the junction. The status of this section remains "transmitted": the essence of our knowledge about the antiquity of Kfar Saba proceeds from religious texts and from tradition, which archaeological research locates without restoring its detail.

The rebirth of Kfar Saba is part of the great movement of Jewish agricultural settlement that transformed the coastal plain at the dawn of the twentieth century. The lands were acquired even before the colony was settled: the new locality was established in 1903 on lands purchased in 1892. The initiative was closely tied to the country's first modern agricultural colony. In 1903, the lands were sold to farmers from Petah Tikva, at eight francs per dunam; the idea was that these lands would be intended for the children of the farmers of Petah Tikva.

The founding gesture took shape in an emblematic construction. The first settlers planted almond trees, olive trees, and a few eucalyptus to drain the marshes. Numerous obstacles were placed in the settlers' path by the Ottoman Turkish authorities. The symbolism of this founding has remained engraved in the town's emblems: at the top of the seal appears the year of the town's founding, that is, the year the Khan was built — 1903 — and the corresponding Hebrew year, 5663 (תרס״ג).

The details of this pioneering settlement confirm the slowness and precariousness of the undertaking under Ottoman rule. The local Khan was built in 1906 and, beside it, stood the first well as well as planted eucalyptus; only in 1912 did the founders obtain the permits to build houses of stone. This section belongs fully to established History: deeds of sale, construction dates, and administrative records fix its chronology with a certainty that antiquity, for its part, does not allow.

The fragile colony did not pass through the First World War unscathed. When the Sharon became a front line between the Ottoman forces and the British army advancing northward, Kfar Saba paid a heavy price. The colony was destroyed by the Ottoman army during the First World War.

This episode, attested by municipal sources, marks a brutal rupture in the still embryonic development of the locality. The stone houses, painstakingly authorized in 1912, and the almond and olive plantations were swept away by the military turmoil. The colony's geographical position, on the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean, made it a point exposed to troop movements. The destruction of the war thus constituted a second founding to come: in the interwar period, almost everything that had been built had to be reconstructed.

This section, brief by documentary necessity, remains "established": the event of the destruction appears in the city's official chronicles, even if local historiography remains discreet about the details of the fighting. It illustrates the vulnerability of the first Jewish settlements in the face of the hazards of imperial geopolitics, and explains why the true rise of Kfar Saba only began after 1918, under a new political regime.

The establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine opened for Kfar Saba an era of reconstruction and growth. The reborn town stood alongside its Arab namesake, a situation whose precise topographical trace is preserved in contemporary sources. The Arab village rose on flat terrain of the coastal plain; the Jaffa–Tulkarem road passed 2.5 km to the east, and the Haifa–Lydda railway line ran 1.5 km to the east, forming the boundary between the lands of Kafr Saba and Qalqilya.

The proximity of the two entities, Jewish and Arab, bearing the same name, constitutes one of the most singular features of local history. A secondary road linked the village to the town of Qalqilya, 3 km to the north-west. The Jewish settlement, for its part, developed to the south-west of the Arab village. The town of Kefar Sava, which had been founded in 1903 and numbered a population of more than 5,000 inhabitants in 1948, lay to the south-west of the village on the eve of the war.

This chapter belongs to the intersection, because it brings together two competing memories — that of the thriving Jewish settlement and that of the Arab village bearing the ancient name — both of which the archives of the Mandate period document. The "probable" status acknowledges that the cohabitation, exchanges, and tensions of this period are attested in their broad outlines, but that their everyday fabric remains largely reconstructed from fragmentary clues.

The 1948 war and the creation of the State of Israel radically transformed the landscape. The Jewish settlement, already firmly established, embarked on a rapid expansion that would absorb it into a continuous urban area. Numbering more than 5,000 inhabitants in 1948, Kefar Sava, with a population of around 45,000 thereafter, expanded until it covered much of the territory of the Arab village.

This growth never wavered. Kfar Saba is the central town of the Sharon region; it covers 14 square kilometers and had a population of 90,000, a figure that other surveys place even higher: today, Kfar Saba has more than 100,000 inhabitants, and many young families contribute to the steady growth of the population.

The town's economy has been thoroughly modernized. Located 15 kilometers from Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean, Kfar Saba has a convenient transport network and enjoys a solid economy, particularly in the high-tech industries; TEVA Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., one of the largest companies in the sector, is based there. The town has also forged international ties: the Israeli twin city of Wiesbaden is a young town, where many young families contribute to steady demographic growth. This chapter, based on reference administrative, demographic, and economic data, belongs unreservedly to established history.

The history of Kfar Saba can be read as a palimpsest, where each age has reinscribed its name upon the previous one without ever erasing it. From the Hasmonean city evoked by the Talmud to the archaeological mound of Khirbet Sabieh, from the Arab village that guarded the ancient toponym to the pioneer colony of 1903, from the Ottoman destruction of the Great War to the high-tech metropolis of the Sharon, the name has served as a guiding thread. Modern Kefar Sava was the first Jewish settlement of the southern Sharon, and this geographical primacy is matched by a historical depth rare in the Israeli landscape.

The "grandfather" that the name perhaps designates thus watches over a continuity made not of stone, but of memory and words. The part that is established — the deeds of sale, the dates of founding, the censuses — there converses constantly with the part that is transmitted — the talmudic tradition, the memory of King Jannaeus, the persistence of the toponym. It is in this fertile tension between archive and memory that the singular identity of Kfar Saba ultimately resides.